Ballet is great, but it could be much better: celebrating the art forms change-makers, challengers, and all-round badasses |#worldballetday
Photo by @dancersdiary. Dancers of Royal Ballet at the barre, captured during livestreamed #worldballetday company class.
As the proverbial pointe shoe nears the end of it's life, soft shank, fraying satin around the box, and the wretched stench of a mere two or three uses, a new shoe is ready and waiting; whilst new, the replacement represents all that the old had once offered: little room for freedom until ripped apart, snapped, shredded, and stomped on, an exact replica of all pairs previous. World Ballet Day is akin to the cyclical christening of a pair of fresh pointe shoes. Every year millions of bunheads celebrate an inarguably beautiful art form. Yet every year we so swiftly waltz past the wretched stench of ballet’s systemic injustices. Not to bring an end to the celebrative atmosphere, of course I am, after all, a huge admirer of ballet, but #worldballetday seems the perfect time to reflect on all of ballet’s shortcomings, a chance to snap, shred, and stomp. In celebration of all that ballet could and should be, I have collated a non-exhaustive list of some of my favourite change-makers, challengers, and all-round badasses, dedicated to making decisive, palpable change to the art form they love – fellow ballet-activists, if you will.
If you feel unread or unqualified then an essential starting point can be found in the opening pages of Chloe Angyal’s Turning Pointe: How A New Generation of Dancers is Saving Ballet from Itself (2021), a great source of inspiration for my own research and theorisation of the ballet-activist. Angyal meticulously dissects some of ballet’s most prolific wrongdoing’s, interviewing dancers, choreographers, and teachers alike. Ballet is woven with inequality, systemic injustice a foundational pillar upon which the art form stands. Years of stagnation, most often in the name of historic preservation, favourable to the cis, white, able-bodied, heteronormative, upper-class majority that populate the ballet scene, has excluded a vast array of ballet bodies. A wave of ballet-activists are now paving the way, emblazoned with an embodied experience of the smothering inequity of a much celebrated art form. If you participate in this art form, congratulations, you are complicit. It is up to you to aid in the breaking down of ballet’s boundaries, sharing the art form you love with all.
Diversifying the lens through which you participate, appreciate, and perhaps teach ballet can be aided with the following resources/organisations:
The #QueerTheBallet initiative was founded by Adriana Pierce, in hopes to ‘broaden the scope of classical ballet to authentically include lgbtqia+ voices and narratives. Focussing on queer cis women, trans people of all genders and nonbinary dancers in ballet, #QueerTheBallet seeks to “queer”...ballet spaces and explore choreography often absent from ballet stages.’ Past projects include a choreographed pas de deux by Pierce, an entanglement of two female dancers, challenging ballet’s deeply rooted gender roles. Find out more and support the #QueerTheBallet initiative here.
OneDanceUK [past-affiliation], the industry’s support organisation, has worked with the Decolonising the Dance Curriculum roundtable to construct RIDE: Representation in Dance Education. This essential resource supports teachers and facilitators of dance in widening the content they teach to participants, ensuring global-majority artists are at the forefront, offering choreographic works to study, guest teachers and companies to contact, and a music bank of diverse class accompaniment. The resource can be accessed for free via this link. Alongside this tremendous resource, OneDanceUK also provide educational resources for teachers supporting students with a range of disabilities, which can be applied to the ballet studio. The Considering Difference – Making Dance Accessible: An Introduction document, is a starting point and can be accessed here.
Dancers Amplified (DA) is a global alliance of artists, igniting voices in the pursuit of social justice in dance. This global, artist-led organisation focusses on ‘communication, knowledge sharing and information gathering’, aiming to ‘actively dissolve the separatist cultures in dance’. DA’s most recent project, Ballet Beyond the Binary & Queering Identities in Dance, offered a panel discussion, navigating the challenges and possibilities of queer identities and advocacy in dance, an overwhelmingly gender-binary adhering, heteronormative landscape. This is a must watch and can be accessed via DA’s website, along with other vital resources.
MoBBallet, Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet, aims to ‘preserve, present and promote the contributions of Blacks in ballet internationally’. Launched in 2015 and founded by diversity strategist and consultant Theresa Ruth Howard, MoBBallet ‘illuminates the lesser-known history and legacies of international professional Black ballet artists that have been muted, or oftentimes eradicated from the larger canon of dance history’. Their research is collated in an online database, or as MoBBallet refer to it, a ‘digital museum’, accessible for free. MoBBallet are in the process of raising funds to develop content, you can support this wonderful organisation via this link.
Tired Movement have been instrumental in opening up conversations regarding racial inequality within the dance industry. Founded by Laura Grant and Stacey Green, Tired Movement are currently raising funds to assist in their essential mission to ‘improve racial equity, representation and inclusion in dance education’; you can find more information and pledge your support on their website. As part of this work, Tired Movement has been pivotal in the fight for inclusive dance-wear for all skin tones, with the introduction of SHADES dancewear, a space previously drenched in options of ‘nude pink’ and ‘skin toned’, synonyms for dance-wear only catered to white dancers. Tired Movement also curate fantastic educational resources which can be read on their Instagram.
Final Bow For Yellowface is an international organisation, co-founded by Phil Chan and Georgina Pazcoguin, working to eliminate outdated stereotypes of Asians on the ballet stage. Ground-breaking work by Final Bow For Yellowface has seen drastic shifts in the choreographic canon, with hundreds of major ballet leaders and companies signing pledges to remove and/or restage outdated, regressive stereotypes and depictions of Asians in ballet, most notably within the Tea variation in The Nutcracker. You can find out more and support the work of Final Bow for Yellowface here.
Dancing with Decolonisation [afflicated, producer] is an international dance conference, dedicated to constructing an annual platform for those wishing to speak on their de/colonial dance research. For the last two years, performers, choreographers, teachers, students, and academics have gathered online to discuss, dissect, and connect with the varying ways in which dance and de/colonial subject matter intersect and interweave. Find out more here.
Fill your social circles and timelines with inspiring voices in ballet:
Minnie Lane @theminnielane - speaks openly about the trials and tribulations of being a queer ballet dancer.
Jospeph Isaac Powell-Main @jpowellmain_ - a professional ballet dancer, dancing on wheels/crutches.
How Queerness Moves @how.queerness.moves - a collaborative residency exploring how the body can move queerly beyond institutions and heteronormative structures.
Progressive Plié @progressiveplie – an Instagram archive of educational posts, unveiling the injustices and corruption within the ballet industry one post at a time.
Minding the Gap @we.are.minding – a organisation seeking to see mental health treated with same seriousness as physical health in dance culture.
Gabrielle Salvatto @gsalvatto – professional dancer, activist and writer.
Dance Data Project @dancedataproject – an organisation advocating for women in dance through data analysis, metrics and programming.
Dance Equity Association @danceequityassociation – an organisation dedicated to supporting dance education through BE COURAGEOUS courses and community collaboration, aiming to embed anti-racism, anti-othering, and anti-abuse practices into the DNA of dance education.
Harper Watters @theharperwatters – professional ballet dancer, first soloist with Houston Ballet.
(I couldn’t possibly neglect to mention…) Biscuit Ballerina (a.k.a., Shelby Williams) @biscuitballerina – a satire/alter ego account, making fun of the seriousness of ballet whilst shining a conscious light on major issues prevalent in ballet.
Join me in seizing this opportunity, on #worldballetday, to take a moment to consider how you contribute to the construction and maintenance of ballet's exclusivity, and how we could now play our parts in taking something we love and making it much better.
Jodie Nunn
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